Modernizing COBOL Apps: 10 Reasons Why It's Important

by Darryl K. Taft

Like the mainframe, COBOL is not dead. In fact, COBOL continues to live and to thrive in various enterprise environments. In the fourth quarter of 2010, IBM saw a 70 percent increase in the sales of its System z mainframes. Likewise, COBOL use continues, with 5 billion lines of new COBOL code being added to live systems every year. Not only that, there are still at least 1.5 million to 2 million developers around the world who today work with COBOL in some way. Moreover, there are more than 200 times more transactions processed by COBOL applications than Google searches each day. COBOL is a proven, robust language. It's robust, with a host of third-party products to support it in testing, debugging, code reuse, application analysis and migration to other platforms. The programming language is scalable and can support large volumes of transactional data, it's reliable for mission-critical applications, and it's portable across platforms. Companies such as Micro Focus and Veryant produce tools that enable developers to extend COBOL to the latest platforms using a variety of application development environments, without having to rewrite code. As enterprises move to more distributed models, COBOL systems will continue to require revisions. This slide show points out 10 reasons why it is important to continue to modernize COBOL apps.

Darryl K. Taft covers the development tools and developer-related issues beat from his office in Baltimore. He has more than 10 years of experience in the business and is always looking for the next scoop. Taft is a member of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and was named 'one of the most active middleware reporters in the world' by The Middleware Co. He also has his own card in the 'Who's Who in Enterprise Java' deck.